Fatal Headwind (4 page)

Despite all his prejudices, Ström had a sharp eye for policing. And while his analysis of the details could be skewed at times, he usually had a good grasp of the overall picture. Ström seemed to want to show me that he had handled leadership of the unit better than I ever could, so he explained his investigative methods in extensive detail. In another mood he could just as easily have concealed information.

“Do you have your car?” he asked when we finally wrapped up after his third cup of coffee and about tenth smoke break.

I nodded.

“Could you drop me off at the train station? I’m headed into the city.”

“Of course.” I took his request for a ride as a sort of attempt at an olive branch, which seemed to come from Ström in the most surprising situations.

Once we had closed up our offices and got to my car, I tried to reciprocate. “What are you up to tonight?” I asked as I accelerated out of the parking garage.

“I thought I’d start getting shitfaced at Planet Hollywood. Hirvonen is probably already waiting there,” Ström said, referring to his drinking buddy. Hirvonen worked in the crime lab. “I can take it a little easier on the weekends now that I’m not in charge of anything. What about you? Is your old man watching the offspring?”

“As you know, her name is Iida. Iida Viktoria Sarkela. I took care of her for a year, and now it’s Antti’s turn.”

“Ah. The boys and I were sure a feminazi like you would never birth a boy.”

“Shut your face or you’re walking the rest of the way,” I said, though not angrily. Ström’s nastiness about my feminist tendencies gave me some latitude to toss back my own sexist comments when I felt like it. The fact that Ström was making fun of Antti taking paternity leave was no surprise. Even my own parents had been confused. Antti considered his leave, which would last at least until Christmas, as a much-needed breather from university politics.

We were both satisfied with how our family life was set up, so why the hell did I feel so restless?

The people I had met on Rödskär wouldn’t leave me in peace, even on the weekend. On Saturday my in-laws came by to celebrate Iida’s first birthday. Antti’s mother brought a copy of a magazine I didn’t usually read.

“When you were on Rödskär, you met Tapio Holma, the opera singer. There’s an article about him in here.”

The title was “How to Survive Life at a Turning Point.” There were three interviews: a businessman who had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer; a female priest whose only child had died in an accident; and Tapio Holma, an opera singer who had lost his voice.

Tapio Holma, 42, won the Timo Mustakallio singing competition sixteen years ago. His career as a schoolteacher fell by the wayside when the opera stages of German called. For the past five years, Holma has been engaged with the Hamburg State Opera, but he has also made regular guest appearances with the Finnish National Opera and at the Savonlinna Opera Festival. His role three years ago as the Marquis de Posa in Verdi’s
Don Carlos
made him a darling of Finnish opera audiences. The heroic baritone seemed to be following in the footsteps of Tom Krause and Jorma Hynninen straight to the top of the international scene. He was courted to play the role of Count Almaviva in the
Marriage of Figaro
at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, one of the world’s leading opera houses. But it was not to be.

“Early last summer I started noticing that my voice was getting tired faster than normal and that it was starting to ‘leak,’ as we say. Late in the summer I played Scarpia in Puccini’s
Tosca
at the Salzburg Music Festival, and the final performances were pure torture: my voice simply wasn’t working.”

A voice therapist diagnosed Holma with severely loosened vocal cords, apparently a result of overexertion. The initial treatment called for rest, so Holma took a leave of absence. After nearly a year’s sabbatical, his baritone still isn’t back to normal, so now the future may call for surgery.

“No one can promise me that surgery will bring my voice back,” Tapio Holma says calmly. “That’s why I’m still not sure yet whether I’m going to take the risk. But I have to make a decision soon, because in this world it only takes a couple of years to be forgotten. The competition is really fierce.”

At the same time his voice was giving out, Tapio Holma also experienced another crisis, but the worst pain of that is already behind him now. For ten years, Holma was married to the German soprano Suzanne Holtzinger. On the opera stage the baritone usually pursues the soprano in vain, like in
Tosca
, in which Suzanne Holtzinger played the lead role in Salzburg. In the opera, the depraved Scarpia attempts to make Tosca give herself to him in exchange for the life of Tosca’s beloved, the tenor Cavaradossi. Tosca pretends to agree but then kills Scarpia. In reality the baritone also lost the soprano to the tenor. Holma’s wife fell in love with the singer playing Cavaradossi.

“Our marriage had been on the rocks for a while, so my wife’s decision wasn’t really that much of a surprise. Of course two big life changes at the same time was an ordeal. There’s no denying that.”

A change of scenery helped ease the crisis. Tapio Holma returned to his hometown of Espoo. Bird-watching, a hobby since his childhood, has kept his spirits up.

“Even if I can’t sing myself, I can enjoy the songs of the birds. Especially early in the summer, nights in Finland are remarkable. The nightingales along the shore . . . Luckily the road construction hasn’t destroyed all the nesting trees.”

A new love interest is also at Holma’s side, Riikka Merivaara, a twenty-year-old university student. Holma is mysterious when he says that when he met Riikka, he literally had to step into the role of a hero, but he refuses to say anything more about the incident.

“Our age difference doesn’t bother me. Riikka is a very wise young woman. She’s taught me a lot and made me think more about my life, for example about the importance of proper nutrition in a person’s overall health and well-being. We’ve been trying to figure out if there might be some sort of alternative therapy for my voice problems. And even if I don’t get my voice back, life still feels worth living. Every day you can hear the song of a bird, even if it’s just a seagull or a crow,” Holma says.

In the photo accompanying the article, Holma looked out at the sea through binoculars. There was a slight smile on his lips: all his trials hadn’t robbed the valiant baritone of his faith in life.

“That’s quite a story,” I said to my mother-in-law as she spooned raspberry-blueberry porridge into Iida’s mouth. “They could practically write a whole libretto about Holma.”

Antti laughed irreverently as he skimmed the story and then asked whether I wanted to see his old Rödskär slides after Iida went down. Of course I did, and I noticed a strange tinge of something in my mind when Antti said he probably also had a few pictures from his voyage on the schooner
Astrid
with Mikke Sjöberg.

The September evening was dark before ten o’clock. Antti set up the screen and turned on the projector. Then he disappeared into the kitchen. “I need a little fortification. We still have some whiskey. Do you want some?”

Antti probably hadn’t looked at these pictures since the death of Tommi, his friend and sailing partner. We had met five years earlier when I was investigating Tommi’s death. As inconceivable as it now felt, Antti had been one of the suspects.

“Just pour me a little.”

Antti brought the whole bottle, and I found myself pouring more than a little. The pictures were what I expected: Antti ten years younger with short hair, standing beside a blond, tanned Tommi, the two of them grinning next to Rödskär’s “Military Area: NO TRESPASSING” sign, fooling around in the lighthouse, and drinking Captain Morgan on the cliffs. The buildings on the island looked more run-down than now, and there was trash littered about.

Deep in thought, I looked at the boys’ lighthearted adventures and thought of Tommi and Harri, who had died too young. What had Harri’s thirty-four years consisted of? Anything but birds? Who was I to judge the richness of anyone else’s life, though? Maybe spotting a black-crowned night heron was just as fulfilling for him as an Olympic victory or winning the jackpot in the lottery would be for someone else.

“There are only a few pictures here from the
Astrid
. I didn’t have my own camera with me. This is me climbing the mast.”

At seventeen Antti looked enthusiastic and innocent. In the next picture he was intently swabbing the deck. The entire crew of the schooner had gathered for the final picture.

“Mikke Sjöberg is on the left in the back row.” As a teenager, Mikke had had bad acne, but it didn’t prevent him from grinning at the camera.

Apparently someone had told a good joke, because the whole group was laughing.

“If someone had told me then I would end up married to a police lieutenant, I never would have believed it. We hated cops.”

“Don’t start with that again,” I said and hit Antti with a pillow.

On our return trip from Rödskär he had asked me what I would do if he and Iida joined the squatters protesting the construction of the new freeway. Would I let my cronies drag them off to the slammer or would I intervene?

“You can go and squat in ten houses if you want, but find Iida a babysitter,” I had said.

“But it’s for Iida’s sake that I’d protest. If development keeps up like this, all of Espoo will be covered in asphalt by the time Iida is our age. Even when we elect people who say they oppose building new roads, it never helps,” Antti had said and sighed.

“Don’t look at me! I don’t know the answer,” I had said and then ended the conversation with a kiss that contained a pinch of guilt.

That night I dreamed about Rödskär, but the man I had kissed in my dream wasn’t Antti, or even Harri. Instead it was someone with sunburned eyebrows and breath that smelled of pipe smoke.

On Sunday we went for a bike ride along the shore. The algae that had been choking the beaches in floating mats had dispersed with the August winds, and dogs and people were enjoying the refreshing water once again. On the ride back, as we passed a McDonald’s, I noticed two police vans surrounded by a crowd that looked like a demonstration. This immediately piqued my curiosity.

“What’s going on over there? I’m going to go have a look. You stay on this side of the road so Iida doesn’t wake up,” I said to Antti.

I left my bike and helmet in the parking lot of the Esso service station next door. It really did look like a demonstration. A group of about thirty young people had occupied the drive-through and surrounded the restaurant. Their placards said things like “You kill the rain forest. AR—Animal Revolution” and “Meat is Murder—Animal Revolution.” They weren’t chanting slogans, but one of the boys was beating an African drum that thumped out over the noise of the traffic.

Two teams from Patrol Division were on scene. One was locked in an intense negotiation with the protesters, so I marched over to the other team, Officers Akkila and Yliaho.

“Look who it is,” Yliaho said. “I heard you were back at work. OK, so now that you’re the big lieutenant, tell us what we’re supposed to do. These brats didn’t file for a permit for this little shindig of theirs.”